The celebrated baseball manager and homespun philosopher was talking about a team sport played with wooden bats and fast balls, but his observation applies with possibly even greater force to individual athletic pursuits like tennis.

“It’s you and your racquet against the world,” says Kate Hays, a Toronto sport psychologist.

This week, Rebecca Marino of Vancouver – until recently a rising star on the women’s professional tour – announced she was putting aside her racquets and abandoning the game that has long been the centre of her young life.

After all, Marino is just 22 years old and by rights should still be in the early stages of a professional career, but her place in the world rankings of female tennis players has plummeted from a high of 38 just two years ago to the low 400s now.

Besides, the kooks, misfits and malcontents who inhabit the darker corners of cyberspace did their worst to bring her down.

“Social media has been taking its toll on me,” she said in a press conference Wednesday.

No one, least of all Marino herself, suggests that abusive behaviour on the Internet was the sole reason for her worsening misfortunes on the court or for her mounting disenchantment with life on the women’s tennis tour.

She acknowledged on Wednesday that chronic depression — what she calls “the darkness” — has haunted her for years. She also had difficulty coping with the social isolation that is a routine fact for a touring tennis pro. She missed her friends, her family, and the prospect of a “normal” life.

But the cyber-bullies were legion, and they surely didn’t help.

Of course, abuse from fans, or from those purporting to be fans, is nothing new.

“The people who before said, ‘You’re a bum,’ now they actually write it down,” says Kim Dawson, a sport psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. “Social media gives access to athletes that was never there before. It’s unprecedented.”

An iPad or a smartphone opens what amounts to a wormhole straight into an athlete’s psyche.

After all, elite athletes — and especially those involved in individual sports such as tennis, golf, or figure skating — tend to lead solitary lives that offer little of the social nurturing that most other people enjoy as a matter of course, a challenge that may be particularly difficult for women.

“Men fight or flee,” says Mario Faveri, a sport psychologist based in London, Ont. “But women want to ‘tend and befriend.’ Women have to get involved in social relationships.”

For a world-class touring pro, holed up in a hotel room a very long way from home, that can’t be easy.

“Athletes have a lot of down time,” says Dawson. “They’re either on or they’re off. When they have some down time, what do they do? They’ve already given up all normal pastimes. So they go straight to their iPads.”

It is easy to imagine how stressful such a life must have become for a woman such as Marino, already saddled with a tendency toward depression.

It was bad enough that she was separated from her family and friends for long periods. What was possibly worse was that her nearest substitute — the Internet — was crawling with venom-spewing weirdos who hide behind a shield of anonymity to vent their abuse.

Worst of the lot, it seems, were Internet gamblers who had lost money on one or another of Marino’s matches and therefore felt entitled to torment her mercilessly about her appearance or to speculate that she might be better off — oh, you know — dead.

“It’s our infinite capacity to idolize people and then bring them down just as fast,” says Hays. “You get 15 minutes of fame, followed by 16 minutes of excoriation.”

The anonymity that is so readily available on the Internet is a big part of the problem.

“It’s called de-individuation,” says Judy Van Raalte, a sport psychologist in Springfield, Mass., and herself a highly accomplished tennis player. “When people are anonymous, they do things they wouldn’t normally do. The Internet is essentially a giant de-individuator.”

You could simply ignore the bile, but that is easier for some than for others.

“I think it was complicated for Rebecca because (the Internet) can pull you in,” says Van Raalte. “It’s a real problem.”

Faveri advocates a no-nonsense response. When elite athletes are preparing for major competitions, he says, there is no solution except to turn the Internet off.

“It’s absolutely essential that you focus only on those things over which you have control,” he says. “When we get involved in social media, we’re allowing the social media malcontents direct access to our homes, to our bedrooms. We have to control that.”

He predicts it will become increasingly common for coaches to ban access to Twitter, Facebook or other social media accounts by the athletes under their tutelage.

“I suspect that’s going to become a norm in all sports,” he says. “Isolate yourselves. You need to be in control of your eyes, your ears, your thoughts.”

As for Rebecca Marino, she may have renounced a career in professional tennis, but she has won widespread admiration for shining a light on her own depression and on the darker side of the Internet.

“I’m most impressed by Rebecca and her openness,” says Faveri. “She is a courageous young woman.”

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